PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

“They don't remember very much about their god.”

That was the phrase that leapt out at me.

I'm a gangly teenager in the family room of our home on the southern shores of Lake Erie, reading for the first time—with mounting excitement—Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today.

“They don't remember very much about their god.”

As if in the voice of an anthropologist observing from outside, Gardner is describing the beliefs of the witches of the New Forest.

How can you not know much about the god you worship? I think, with adolescent arrogance.

Naturally, I wanted to know more.

Now, just how much any human can be said to know about any god remains, of course, an operative theological—or perhaps epistemological—question. Rhetorically, Gardner's observation very cleverly turns a defect into an advantage. “They've been around for so long that they've forgotten much,” he implies. In fact, as we now know, the reality of the situation was somewhat more complex.

In fact, this type of forgetting does happen regularly in oral traditions. The Kalasha of what is now northwestern Pakistan, the only Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, have lost virtually all of their mythology, and their gods tend to be shadowy figures, known mainly for their practical functions. (That's what happens when life is a struggle: it's the basics that you hold onto, while the non-essentials slough away.) Why do the altars of the gods all feature four carved wooden horse heads? No one among the Kalasha remembers any more. We don't know why, they tell researchers: it's always been that way.

(Cross-cultural comparativism provides a ready answer to the question: they're the four horses that pull the god's chariot. Altar as quadriga: a characteristically Indo-European kind of metaphor, preserved like a flower in amber for more than 4000 years. Yes Diana, academic arrogance aside, sometimes the anthropologist really does know more than the informant.)

That skinny, wide-eyed teen in Erie, Pennsylvania didn't know any of this, of course; he was feeling his way with his skin. That didn't stop him from taking up the challenge, though: just as Gardner intended, perhaps.

As I make the physical and spiritual preparations for this summer's upcoming Grand Sabbat, the ecstatic adoration of the embodied Horned Lord, I look back over a life of more than 50 years in the Craft.

A Thought Experiment

Two of the modern Craft's Grand Old Men, Gerald Gardner and Victor Anderson, claimed initiation into preexisting covens: Gerald into the New Forest coven in southern England, Victor into the Harpy coven in the northwestern US. Were their claims true?

Well, there's true and there's true. After decades of historical research, mostly by true-believers, the evidence—to my mind, at least—remains tenuous, at best. But, speaking as a storyteller who has told a few in his time, let me tell you that it's nearly always more convincing to embroider what actually was, than to make up something out of whole cloth.

So let me tell you what I suspect.

Did the New Forest and Harpy covens actually exist? Personally, I suspect that there were indeed two small groups of like-minded people—would-be occultists, maybe—who together studied their way into magic, and maybe even eventually into the Craft. My guess would be that we see here, in both instances, small groups of people who got together to experiment with magical practice, that eventually came to think of themselves (or, at least, to be thought of—by VA and GBG, if by no one else) as covens, but only retrospectively.

Why did Gerald Gardner choose the Horned God and Moon Goddess as the divine patrons of his Revival Witchcraft and, by extension, of the entire Pagan Revival?

Well, in a sense, he didn't choose them: one could say—again, in a sense—that they chose him.

These, in fact, were two of the three available strands—the third being Ceremonial Magic—from which Gardner plaited the cord of the Modern Craft: the Murray/Horned God/solar calendar strand, and the Leland/Moon Goddess/lunar calendar strand.

But let us go deeper.

The Horned God, of course, is preeminently God of Animals and, as such, of the Body. Insofar as Revival Paganism personifies the Western world's necessary return to the body, its truths and cycles—the reembodiment of Western spiritual life—one could hardly choose a more fitting divine patron.

As for the Lady of the Moon: she herself is the goddess who grows, who wanes, who is no more—and who returns. Lady of Cycles, of birth, death, and rebirth, she in her very being shows forth the truth of the New Paganism. What once was, but was no more, is now again.

It was the flowing-together of these two currents—this confluence, this Great Rite of traditions—that brought forth the Modern Craft, and—by extension—Modern Paganism as a whole.

With Lammas Eve barely a bowshot away, let us ask the question: what do we make of Operation Cone of Power?

Gerald Gardner loved to tell the story of how the witches of England came together to work magic to prevent the Nazi invasion of Britain. Through his career as self-appointed public spokesman for the Craft, he told it many times, in various—if not always internally consistent—recensions.

Certainly the story made for good publicity. “See: we may be witches, but at least we're patriotic.”

And—who knows—it may even be true. His accounts of the ritual differ just enough from what would later become the CM-based standard Wiccan ritual format to inspire consideration of the possibility. In Crafting the Art of Magic, Aidan Kelly posits (with, be it admitted, no evidence whatsoever)  that it may actually have been the first ritual ever performed by the so-called New Forest Coven.

One would certainly think that the possibility of invasion by a hostile power might be enough to get a bunch of like-minded armchair occultists actually up and doing, for a change. So an actual Operation Cone of Power (as it later came to be called) seems a possibility, if not proven.

(Of course, 1939 is more than a decade before the earliest evidence for Wicca's first stirrings. Probably likeliest of all is that Operation Cone of Power II was an “if-only” fantasy of the Father of Modern Witchcraft.)

What, though, to make of Gardner's claims of a magical precedent for the working: that the witches of Elizabethan times worked the same magic against the Spanish Armada?

Let's say (again without evidence) that there actually were in late 16th-century Britain witches like us: a self-acknowledged minority of magic-workers with shared religious interests.

Would it have been in our interest to ward off Spanish takeover?

Some people have saints. Pagans have heroes.

But you don't have to slay a dragon to become one.

To the ancestors, heroes (the term is gender-neutral) were those who had done such outstanding things that they deserved to be remembered for them.

You found a city, you're a hero. You teach the People something important that makes their life better, you're a hero.

Who are our modern pagan heroes? Well, they differ from group to group. Some would number Gerald Gardner among them. Doreen Valiente, Robert Graves, Robert Cochrane: they weren't perfect people, they weren't gods.

But they each did something remarkable, something that we, their inheritors, have benefited from, and therefore they deserve to be remembered.

The Kalasha of NW Pakistan are the only surviving Indo-European people who have practiced their ancient religion uninterruptedly since antiquity. In their valleys, there's an altar to the hero who taught the People to make cheese.

I usually stick to much older history, but having had the chance to catch the Doreen Valiente exhibit at Preston Manor in Brighton, I figured I should share a few pictures as I know it's a bit tricky for many folks to get there. The exhibit itself is small but there's a great delight in seeing how intimately history is made by a most unassuming woman. I picked up Philip Heseltine's biography too and am much enjoying it. Here are some of the artifacts collected:

AP: London

New evidence released by the Gardner Family Archive suggests that Gerald Gardner (1884-1964), the Father of Modern Wicca, actually renounced the religion that he was instrumental in founding just days before his death.

In a posthumously-received letter to his eldest sister, Graizell, dated February 10, 1964—two days before his death—Gardner wrote:

This Wica [sic] is a cuckoo's egg, a rum deal really. Ive [sic] done with it. Its [sic] all rot, really. Well there's an end to it then, hands washed for good and all. Who knows, maybe Ill [sic] turn Turk [convert to Islam] next.

Handwriting experts have confirmed that the letter was in fact written by Gardner.